How Much Does A Minimum Viable Product Cost

If you’ve ever
wanted to hire a mobile app agency or a freelancer to build your MVP
(minimum viable product), you’ve probably been hit with prices anywhere
between $500 and $1,000,000. That’s a huge gap! During the early stages
of your product, your goal is to build an MVP to validate your business
idea. To get the most out of your MVP, you’ll want to build only what is
necessary. Once you know what is and isn’t necessary you’ll understand
exactly how to price your MVP. We will go into the differences between
an MVP and a prototype. We’ll touch upon the factors that determine the
price. Finally, we’ll answer your question: How much should your MVP cost?

Your Minimum Viable Product Is An Investment

The
minimum viable product is the initial investment in your product. The
purpose of an MVP is to validate your business idea. Your minimum viable
product is not your final product. Most of the time it is not suitable
to launch to the entire world. Simply put, your MVP is an experiment
that answers the most important question for your product: Is this
viable? A successful MVP can give you enough traction to raise funding. A failed MVP will demonstrate that your initial solution to your customer’s problem isn’t good enough.
An MVP can also show you that the problem that you’re solving isn’t
worth much to your customers. MVPs save time and money by keeping you
focused on the problems and solutions that are relevant to your
customers. If your solution is not valuable, you’ll know immediately;
not after six months of design and development. Prototypes can also help
you validate a product idea. However, prototypes are often incomplete
implementations. Prototypes rely on the illusion of a product rather
than a working product. A prototype can simply be a PowerPoint or
Keynote presentation that shows the different sections of your idea. An
MVP could be an underlying implementation of your app idea that runs on
your phone.

Lower MVP Costs By Being Lean

The Key to building a minimum viable product is staying lean throughout the majority of the process. The Lean Startup
popularized the concept of the MVP. According to Eric Reis, the most
successful companies build upon their ideas in small iterations. The
idea tests, measures, and analyzes each feature and tweak it so that you
solve your customer’s problems while building them something that they
want to use. Your MVP is the core features that make your product great.
Knowing this, we can assume that the size of an MVP depends on the size
of your product. If you’re building an app that lets you share stickers
with your friends, your MVP should only focus on the quality of
stickers and the sharing these awesome stickers with friends. Everything
else should fall by the wayside. Remember that the purpose for the MVP
is to validate your idea. For the example app, we’d validate how many
times the user shares the stickers with their friends. You can also
measure a number of purchases made per user, and even calculate the
likelihood of a user making a purchase. Measure these interactions and
other key business activities, and you’ll have an excellent MVP that you
can leverage to get to the next stage of your product.

Show Your MVP To A Few Users

Your
MVP is not ready for prime time. You should launch your MVP to a small
section of users with the purpose of gathering data. Your MVP should not
win any design or interaction awards. It should instead fulfil your
user’s needs. Your minimum viable product mustn’t focus on scalability
or even getting the right technology stack right. If you spend your time
on design and scalability without validating your business idea or
achieving product market fit, you are throwing away money. Instead,
focus on what matters, your core features. You should iterate on your
core features until you have a product that your users love. The process
of iteration is where you’ll spend the most time and money. Your
product will go through cycles where you experiment with the product and
measure the effects of your efforts. It’s here that you get the most
value.

Iterate for Success

Iterating on your product’s MVP
allows you to gain validated learning. Validated learning gives you the
insight to push forward on your product idea or to pivot. When you can
honestly say that your product is a hit with your test group and your
app is hitting or exceeding your key performance indicators, you’ll know
that it’s time to stay the course. However, if you find that your MVP
isn’t gaining traction, you’ll have the opportunity to pivot without
wasting time and money. Without going through this process, you risk
building the wrong product.

If Your Product Exists Build An MVP Anyway

There are instances where you may find a product or service on the market that is similar to your idea. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that because this product exists, it stands as validation for your product.
Apps like Facebook, Uber, and Twitter exist today in their current
funded state. These apps receive millions of dollars in funding to be
where they are right now. Most untested start-ups don’t have this luxury
and begin moving forward with costly development without doing the
groundwork to validate their products. Do not take this risk, unless you
are willing to bet your development’s time money and energy. Instead,
before development, identify the riskiest propositions of your idea and
test it using the cheapest methods possible. Once validated then move to
actual production.

It’s Worth The Investment

An MVP,
though small, can be a hefty investment. The benefits of testing your
product before launching to the public, however, is priceless. Build an
MVP to gain validated learning for your product. You want to give it the
best chance to succeed. Therefore, build your product in small
manageable chunks. Focus on prototyping features and validating them
with your core audience. Once each feature is good enough and the
calumniation of the features solve your customers’ core problem, you
have an MVP. If you’re thinking about building an MVP or performing a Design Sprint, we can start talking about that today.